The C&O Alleghany Mountain route is a first edition of my depiction of the 1975 era C&O Alleghany Division. This edition includes 37 miles on the winding 0.6% grade western slope of Alleghany Mountain where the main action is pulling 100 car coal drags to the crest of the Appalachian Mountains which divide the state of West Virginia from Virginia. My priority for this route is to depict the area as accurately as possible from my childhood memory and historic documentation using only the default game content and user-created freeware assets available for Railworks.While my creation is highly scenic with a wide variety of landscape items, there is also plenty of action to be found. Besides the heavy freight run-thrus, there is lots of local freight movement going on, opportunities for passenger train fun, liberal [un]loading facilities to enjoy and plenty of switching to do in the cramped and busy small industrial yards along this mostly double-track route. While the track infrastructure is complete, there is still a good bit of scenery to place. It's been a big job but I am hoping to release this by Christmas.

micaelcorleone wrote:It looks just....wow! Fascinating.But it would be nice if you could add some more trees in the distant not just right beside the racks.Which railroad runs there today?

I agree about the trees... but I wrangled with that for months, trying different methods and all results were bad. Either the performance takes a huge hit from the tile item counts from bunches of individual trees, or, it takes me days to do a mile of track with "group tree" assets because it's nearly impossible to eliminate "floaters" on these uneven rolling hills. In the end, I had to settle for "what the driver sees from the cab". There will be more foliage when it's finished, but the hills will remain "naked from the waist up".

The C&O grew into CSX by absorbing other railroads, so you could say this route is the birthplace of CSX.

harryadkins wrote:How did you create the track chart? It will be very useful to scenario planners.

Believe it or not, I used Paint. Yea, I found that simple thing that comes with Windows works better for this than any of my other software. A tip: holding down Shift while drawing a line in Paint restricts your pen to 1 of 8 directions.... makes for nice straight lines with no effort.

It is now 2 weeks until Christmas. Realistically, I think a first public beta will probably come about Jan 10. That means I have to start packaging it on the 5th. Shipping an "All inclusive" asset pack that installs as an RW Package is a VERY challenging task. Thanks for everyone's patience as I tidy up the last few loose ends and finish plopping the thousands of trees and plants still needed. Even the first beta will not have ALL of the foliage done, but will be decorated enough to start enjoying and trying out some of your own scenarios and rolling stock.